Yes, John Yoo Is Still a Monster

On a weekend that began, for reasons only God knoweth, with Salon once again handing some bandwidth over to pop-culture loon and Madonna-stalker Camille Paglia so that Paglia could misunderstand, and be wrong about, virtually everything all over the place, it was tough for anyone to produce the weekend's worst piece of punditry. Luckily, former Bush administration testicle-crusher John Yoo was up to the task. I swear to Christ, if John Yoo hadn't been born, Pol Pot would have had to invent him.

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(The Paglia interview is apparently tied to the fact that Camille has decided to misunderstand and be wrong about everything again at book length for some publisher who plainly should not be trusted to spoon his own oatmeal: "My third reason for going Green is the creeping totalitarianism of Obamacare, which Jill Stein as a physician is rightly skeptical about." I know Jill Stein. Jill Stein is a friend of mine. And you, Camille, are no Jill Stein. Jill Stein is in favor of Medicare For All, by which the government would run the health-care system. Ask your pals on wingnut radio in which system the authoritarianism is creepiest. Oh, hell, I just brought the whole thing up so I could link to this again.)

In short, brother Yoo believes that the president in whose lap he sat for several years was correct in going beyond the strict constitutional parameters of his office in order to slap people onto waterboards, but that the current president is flirting with authoritarianism by allowing teenagers to come out of the shadows and go to college or join the army. Apparently, Yoo sees a greater threat to democracy in the misuse of the immigration statutes than in the misuse of the president's war powers. I am not kidding about this at all....

As a Justice Department lawyer in the Bush administration, I took the view that the White House could refuse to carry out an unconstitutional law that infringed on the president's commander-in-chief authority to manage war and defend the national security. I agree that our immigration system demands fundamental reform, particularly in how it treats those brought here as infants. But the president cannot refuse to enforce a law simply because he disagrees with it.

So, the argument is that a president — say, the one you served with such lapdoggish vigor — is free to break a law he disagrees with, but not ignore one? Or is it that there is a substantive constitutional difference between "refusing to carry out" a law and "ignoring" a law? And we are supposed to believe that this substantive difference is anything more than the difference in political party from President A to President B? Stop it, John. No, seriously. I'm dying here. This stuff must kill at the Federalist Society Open Mic Night.

Obama's supporters, of course, may well argue that Obama's immigration proclamation is no worse than President Bush's claim that Congress cannot limit the executive's efforts to intercept Al Qaeda communications during wartime. But there is a constitutional world of difference in refusing to enforce laws that violate the president's own constitutional powers, and ignoring laws that a president simply dislikes. There is a world of difference between putting aside laws that interfere with an executive response to an attack on the country, as in Sept. 11, 2001, and ignoring laws to appeal to a constituency vital to re-election.

That "constitutional world of difference" is encompassed entirely by the phrase, "the guy who signed my paycheck." This you can see by the way Yoo stumbles over his own feet within a single sentence, suddenly shifting the constitutional — and the literal — atrocities for which he is partly responsible from "the president's own constitutional powers" to "an executive response to an attack on the country." John Yoo helped design a lawless presidency. He is no more a credible authority on all of this than a brick is on the tensile strength of a window.

(And, of course, there was nothing to prevent the Republicans from suggesting this course of action first, thereby actually competing for that same voting bloc. Except, of course, that a huge chunk of their political base is demented on the subject.)